aviationwiz wrote:I didn't know that in the definition of 'computer' was that it had to crash!

Nah, if that was the case, Macs would have been computers already. I've seen software crash on a mac before... but it doesn't crash so often for me on my PC (except when i'm betatesting, but that does NOT count).

Ian wrote:i've had an iMac for years and I've had little use for it primarily due to its OS. So no, I probably would never use OS X.

Does it run OS 9 or OS X? OS 9 was pretty sucktacular, but OS X is amazing!

dolphinius_rex wrote:Nah, if that was the case, Macs would have been computers already. I've seen software crash on a mac before... but it doesn't crash so often for me on my PC (except when i'm betatesting, but that does NOT count).

I've seen *SOFTWARE* crash on a Mac before, but I don't recall ever seeing a software crash bring down the whole OS in OS X.

It was OS X not OS9. Since it's a professionally used Mac used for video editing and mastering, it's pretty high end. That doesn't stop it from being a little unstable though. The sad thing is that when we were having the demonstration, the guy actually told us about how he has to assume one thing will freeze and crash under certain regular parameters, so he has to take precautions, which include closing and reloading the program at certain times.

As far as Windows crashing more than OS X.. if you know what you're doing, Windows is a very stable OS.

I have always felt this way about Windows. If you know what you're doing and stay away from file sharing & porn sites that load all kinds of crap on your machine without your knowledge, you will have little to no issues. Of course, running anti-spyware/malware programs will keep things even cleaner (programs like Spybot & Ad Aware to name 2)

You have to expect that occasionally a program will crash and even sometimes the OS, but 99% of the time, a reboot is all that it takes to cure the ill. On today's pcs, a reboot takes what, 2 minutes at most.

And if you know what you're doing, a crash whether hw or sw related, is nothing to be afraid of, if you do regular backups (which most people don't do) you will have any important data saved somewhere, and if you're like me, you run Ghost on your pc, and once a week I take 5 minutes to do a complete image of my pc, if it were to crash beyond recovery (which hasn't happened yet), I just Ghost the machine with the image. Plus the Ghost image takes care of me having to do a complete reinstall of everything when I just decide to wipe the pc out and redo it (just because it's just time to do it) .

Ian wrote:If it weren't for MS's monthly patches, I'd probably never reboot. Back in the NT 4.0 days, my daily desktop machine had an uptime of like 3 months.

Ian, I rarely reboot my PowerBook, even I never shutdown, after use I close it and it sleeps, I have to reboot more for some software updates than for Applications crashes.

Of course Intel Macs are another story, developers just begin to release their software. For example Skype releases their Universal Binary just some days ago and the software doesn't run even on old Macs, they are really stupid, release an untested software

Anyway I think that virtualization software is a better solution than dual booting, there is Parallels and VMware has said it will have VMware for Mac OS, and also there are rumors about some project by Apple to run win applications directly in Mac OS.

Alejandra wrote:Skype releases their Universal Binary just some days ago and the software doesn't run even on old Macs, they are really stupid, release an untested software

I've used Skype on Pocket PC, Windows XP, and Mac OS X (Dual PM G5), and my friend has used it on Linux, and it's buggy on each and every one. Skype is one of the buggiest programs out there, but it works great for voice chat compared to anything else. Overall though, I would have to say that it is the most stable under Mac OS X.